Well, it is getting time to move on because we have a deadline approaching. We need to be in Puerto Morelos, Mexico (20 minutes south of Cancun) by February 18 to meet Luke's family for their 1 week vacation. Tomorrow we will head to the colonial city of Antigua, Guatemala, for about 3 nights before going to the Mayan ruins of Tikal, in the northern part of Guatemala.
Today we got up early because we arranged a horseback riding tour with Salvador, a 26 year old guide living here in San Pedro. He was a really friendly guy and about the only one that didn't offer us some marijuana or cocaine, so we decided to go with him. We rode through town on the horses and then hit the trail along the lake. We rode through the coffee fields to a deserted beach and a mirador (view area) of the lake. It was a beautiful calm morning on the lake and Emily had one of her first experiences on a galloping horse.This area grows a lot of coffee, so we took some photos of the coffee fruit on the trees and then walked over to the big pile of coffee and where they process it and get it ready for export (mainly to the USA). The coffee grows all over the mountains at certain elevations (around 1600 meters ASL) and the workers handpick it and put it in burlap sacks and then carry it to the road where someone comes around and weighs it with a scale and then buys it from the pickers for about 20 cents a pound for the raw fruit. Just watching the pickers carry these huge bags of coffee, sometimes weighing as much as 50 kg (110 pounds), makes our necks hurt. They strap a rope around and under the bottom of the bag, swing the bag around so it rests on their back like a backpack and put the strap up around their foreheads so all the weight is suported by their necks! Afterwards, the buyer puts the sacks of coffee in his pickup truck and brings it to one of the processing facilities in town, where they place it in a giant pile to ferment. The fermenting coffee produces a terrible scent that you can smell all over town (Luke says it smells exactly like Red Man chewing tobbacco, although his sniffer wasn't able to pin down whether it smelled more like the leaf or plug variety). After fermenting in the big pile (see photo below) they sort it and remove the outer coating of fruit and then dry the bean in the sun.
Coffee fruit
Mound of coffee
Bags of fresh squeezed orange juice and a mixed fruit smothie. It's great being able to satisfy our sweet tooths without eating a ton of refined sugar!
3 comments:
Great horse shot! The coffee explanations and pics interesting. The photo of bagged beverages is great, especially for U.S. people to see. A little plastic bag takes up less space than plastic and styrofoam cups in the garbage.
Ma
I think the plastic baggies still suck, they should really use paper or start recycling plastic here. the plastic pollution is terrible. That would be great if they recycled plastic, then everyone would go around picking up all the trash everywhere for $ and it would be clean!
best method would be to use glass or pottery, an re-use it after cleaning. using glass is most common in germany. since about a year or so german beaverage sellers are forced to take back all plastic bottles and pay a refund for every bottle. Of course the price is now a little higher, but people switch more often to glass and there is much less garbage. it would be interesting to know, if guatemala has a plastic producing company at all? but anyway, really nice pictures from guatemala! you come around a lot. cheers, guido
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